Man found not guilty in Indigenous teen’s death
Tina Fontaine had been dumped in river
WINNIPEG• Am an accused of killing a 15- year-old Indigenous girl and dumping her body in Winnipeg’s Red River has been found not guilty of second- degree murder.
Tina Fontaine’s remains were discovered eight days after she was reported missing in August 2014. She had been wrapped in a duvet cover and weighed down with rocks.
Her death prompted renewed calls for an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women.
Raymond Cormier, 56, was charged more than a year later.
Tina’s family gasped as the verdict was read after 11 hours of jury deliberations. Her great-aunt Thelma Favel, the woman who raised Tina on the Sagkeeng First Nation, wept. Cormier’s reaction was not visible because the prisoner’s box f aced away from the gallery.
“F--k you if you think you can get away with this,” said Fontaine’s biological mother, Valentina Duck, before walking out of the courtroom.
Reaction f rom the Indigenous community was swift.
“This is not the outcome anybody wanted. The systems, everything that was involved in Tina’s life, failed her. We’ve all failed her. We as a nation need to do better for our young people,” said Sheila North, grand chief of an organization that represents northern Manitoba First Nations. “This is a message to them that is probably discouraging, saying that it’s OK to kill our Indigenous young people. It is not OK.”
“All of us should be ashamed of what happened to her.”
North also relayed a message from Favel.
“I want to pass on a message from Thelma that we have to maintain the peace,” North said. “She does not want to see any more violence against anyone. She doesn’t want to see any retaliation, because that’s not what our people are about.
“She wants peace. She wants healing. She wants justice and we’re going to continue to look for that justice on her behalf.”
“Justice was not served today,” said Sagkeeng Chief Derrick Henderson. “My community of Sagkeeng will be hurting as I go home today. The people in this country need to know Tina was loved by everybody.”
“The system has failed our people. We need to correct that. We need to right that for all the Indigenous people in this world.”
It’s the second acquittal in the murder of a young Aboriginal in as many weeks. An all- white Saskatchewan jury found farmer Gerald Stanley not guilty in the murder of Colten Boushie, a 22- year- old Cree man, on Feb. 9. It set off a wave of protests in cities across the country with demands for changes to the justice system and how juries are selected.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he sympathized with the Boushie family and promised to consider ending the use of peremptory challenges — the process of picking a jury by rejecting potential jurors without giv- ing a reason — to screen out people along racial lines.
Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman said in a statement issued hours after the Cormier verdict that “we all failed Tina.”
“No one can be blind to the racial tensions in our country. The work of the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls is shedding light onto a dark past of violence and a history of racism in Canada. All of us have a responsibility to challenge racism and discrimination when we see it. And all of us need to work to repair the broken relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people,” Bowman said.
In the Tina Fontaine murder trial, the Crown had argued that Cormier convicted himself with his own admissions on secret police recordings, but the defence said numerous forensic holes in the prosecution’s case had left reasonable doubt. The defence called no witnesses in the three-week trial.
Tina was being sexually exploited after coming to Winnipeg from her home on Sagkeeng First Nation, 120 kilometres north of Winnipeg.
There was no DNA evidence linking Cormier to the teen and doctors who were called to testify said they could not definitively say how Tina died.
Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Glenn Joyal had told jurors that if they weren’t satisfied that Tina’s death was caused by an unlawful act, such as being smothered or dumped in the water while unconscious, then they had to find Cormier not guilty.
Over the weeks of testimony, the jury heard how Tina’s relatively stable upbringing spiralled out of control when her father was murdered. Her mother came back into her life and Tina had gone to visit her in Winnipeg, where the girl descended into life on the streets.
She and her boyfriend met the much-older Cormier in the summer of 2014. The jury heard Cormier gave the couple a place to stay, gave Tina drugs and had sex with her.
Witnesses remember Tina and Cormier fighting in the street over a stolen truck and Tina accusing him of selling her bike for drugs. Tina went so far as to report a stolen truck to police.
She was in the care of social services and was staying at a Winnipeg hotel when she disappeared.
Her 72- pound body was found wrapped in a Costco duvet cover that several witnesses said was similar to one Cormier owned. Experts testified the river had washed away any DNA on the cover.
Investigators went undercover after Cormier was arrested but not charged in Tina’s murder.
They offered Cormier an apartment that had been bugged. The secret recordings formed the heart of the Crown’s case.
Cormier was recorded telling a woman that he would make a bet that Tina was killed because he had had sex with her and then “I found out she was 15 years old.”
The defence took issue with the quality of the recordings and argued that without DNA evidence and no cause of death, the Crown couldn’t prove that Tina didn’t die from a drug overdose or naturally in what Cormier’s lawyer called the “underbelly of the city.”